


we have existed (not to be found in our obituaries)

by obfuscatress



Series: Portrait of a Lady [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Memories, Gen, Growing Up, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25001107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: Eve is twelve when she decides she wants to be a police officer. Life takes her elsewhere.
Series: Portrait of a Lady [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/485450
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	we have existed (not to be found in our obituaries)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isthisrubble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthisrubble/gifts).



> Title from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land V line 406-407. Please note warnings may change in the coming part to include graphic depictions of violence. Likewise, tags will be added as appropriate.

**i.**

She likes the world best viewed from above, precariously balanced on her father’s bulky shoulders. Eve is three and the neighbourhood Tesco unfolds like a kingdom beneath her, shelves upon shelves collecting dust under her watchful gaze. She doesn’t have the words to explain the way it feels (yet) - seeing the big picture in a world where you’re so little - but it buzzes in the pit of her stomach, the power of it intoxicating. She could levitate with it if it weren’t for her dad’s grounding hand around her ankle, but one day she’ll outgrow that too.

**ii.**

She’s four and the hospital hallway echoes the high pitch whine of her rubber soles on a scuffed linoleum floor. Somewhere in this foreign part of the world, she has a sister.

“Ready?” her dad asks and Eve nods even though she’s not at all certain she is.

After all, she’s a big girl now and big girls don’t hesitate. She rises high and fast in his arms, has a bird’s eye view of what is about to happen to her life, and there’s safety in that.

“Evie,” her mum says when she sets her eyes on them. Her eyes are already soft with that special look that’s supposed to be only Eve’s.

Something has changed and  _ The Something _ croaks demandingly in her mum’s arms. “Come meet your little sister,” her mum says as if she’s translating.

On the bed, Eve crawls closer, hesitant of this new creature that has lived inside her mother for so long. The baby is just like any other she’s seen and she doesn’t understand at first why this one is meant to be special.

They name the baby Leona and take her home to sleep in the room opposite Eve’s where the paint is pure on the walls. Sometimes, in the early hours on a weekend morning, Eve willl sneak across the hallway to watch her baby sister and it finally begins to dawn on her: Leona may be a clumsy, jerky little thing (noisy most of the time too), but when Eve smiles, Leona smiles back.

**iii.**

The year after Leona is born, the house down the street - the one that’s stood empty for as long as Eve’s short memory can fathom - finds new occupants. She passes it on her way back from school as casually as always, dangling from her dad’s hand, recounting her day in an eager word vomit when she thrown off balance and stops dead in her tracks at the sight of a stunning white Doberman in front of the not-lived-in house. It licks its jowls and Eve stops breathing, strung tight with want. Want to touch, to see, to absorb this creature.

“Daddy, can I pet the dog?” she asks. She’s been taught to always ask her parents, even though she knows dogs on leashes are pettable as long as its owner says so, and this one smiles at her.

To Eve’s surprise though, the hand around hers tightens for the first time and tugs her closer to her dad’s side. “I don’t think this is a good dog to pet, darlin’,” he says, and Eve watches the Doberman turn the other way at the gate, trotting away from her.

When they meet again, it’s four months later under circumstances more forgiving of making an acquaintance. Eve has turned six and learned to ride a bike; she’s allowed out by herself on a Sunday afternoon now, pedaling faster and faster with the wind washing through her curls until her legs are on fire and she’s so out of breath it feels like she’s floating. When the high fades, she’s on the upside of hill running out of momentum, the bike wobbling treacherously beneath her. Out of stamina, Eve sets her feet on the ground,and finds herself face to face with the Doberman across the fence.

It barks at her once, quiet and low the way Aunt Soleil’s dogs sometimes do when they’re unsure of someone. This dog is nothing like her Auntie’s spaniels though and Eve takes an instinctive step backwards from the dog, shuffling the bike along with her.

“Hello,” she says to the dog in much the same tone of voice it used on her, all fear and faked assertiveness. Suddenly, she isn’t so sure the rusty chain link fence between them is going to keep her safe from a dog this large, but Eve isn’t willing to back off either.  _ Only a scaredy cat would run home _ , she tells herself, not that she has any idea of what the alternative entails.

When she was afraid on her first day of school, she simply swallowed around the nervous knot in her throat and said, “I’m Eve,” to the first kid she ran into, so she decides to do the same now.

It doesn’t have quite the same effect as it did in the classroom.

The dog doesn’t reply, merely lies down to watch her. Eve, in turn, gets off her bike. They size each other up, Eve standing taller even though the dog must be twice her weight. It’s got a name tag, that much she can make out even if she can’t read what it says yet. She wonders if she could ask her teacher about it later if she copies the letters down, so she opens her backpack to find some pen and paper, but stumbles upon the remains of her lunch first. It’s only a soggy half of a chicken sandwich by now, but she reckons it’ll do for a dog, so she dissects the thing right there on the concrete, wiping the excess mayo off on the backside of the toast before she tosses the scraps of meat over the fence.

She knows she’s not allowed to touch the dog, but her dad never said anything about sharing lunch, and Eve has learned to work with loopholes. While the Doberman is occupied, she scoots a little closer to scratch the letters on the collar into the back of her notebook. She doesn’t ask anyone about them though. Instead, she waits until she’s learned the alphabet.

When she comes back, she’s got more lunch scraps and a name in her mouth. “Hi, Blondie,” she says and the dog’s ears pick up.

**iv.**

With each passing year Eve gains more knowledge of the world, her awareness of herself within it gathers as a dark cloud on the horizon. She sees more than she’s meant to, but struggles to piece it all together in a way that makes sense, the restless static in her mind failing to coalesce into lightning.

Then, one day, she’s in the bath with Leona when their mum smiles at them and it feels like the sun breaking through it all: blinding, light upon light so bright it shines all the way in her eyes.

It’s a smile brought on by the impression Eve does of her least favourite teacher, the cotton candy pink foam beard slipping down her chin as she struggles to lower her child’s voice to mimic Mr Turner’s baritone. Eve doesn’t expect it at all, the startling happiness on her mum’s face that makes Eve realise she must have been tired all day. That’s what those lines on her face are: fatigue.

“It’s okay, Mummy,” she says, petting her mum’s cheek the way she normally pets Eve’s, “It’s almost bedtime.”

A hint of surprise flashes in her mum’s eyes and tugs the corners of her mouth straighter. Eve still counts the expression as a smile because the net movement is up and her understanding of emotions is rudimentary at best, but it does not feel like something happy.

Then Leona drops the soap bar into the water, a splash and  _ clank _ that jerks her mother back into the reality of their dingy little bathroom where she curls her fingers around Eve’s soapy hand and places a soft kiss against her playground scraped knuckles.

“Alright you two, time to stop goofing off. We’re washing your hair now.”

**v.**

Eve and Leona have dirty, blood streaked fights sometimes, bickering in the backyard over the tire swing that refuses to hold them both at once. Eve is twice as old as her sister with a stone and a half more weight to throw into her tackles, but Leona refuses to see herself as being at an disadvantage and makes up for it with raw fury. It works for the most part too, their claim to the bandages in the bathroom cabinet nearly equal.

Leona bites her, leaving fading indentations that’ll vanish by the time their dad comes around to break them up and in turn, Eve leaves invisible bruises, subterranean pools of blood she’ll be able to prod days after an argument to win it all over again.

For now, Eve is ahead, but she’s not ignorant to the fact that with each passing day, Leona catches up a little more.

There’s a radiance in Leona now that used to be Eve’s alone, one she guarded withher little life, but which Leona got her hands on anyway. It happens everywhere with everything these days. Leona’s found her way into Eve’s jar of hair ties and she stains the shirts Eve used to love (passed down by their mother and the passage of time), and so they inevitably end up wrestling over it all in the garden. There simply isn’t enough space for the both of them here.

Other times, however, they’re a dynamic duo to be reckoned with: two sharks in the water swimming circles around an unsuspecting third party. They’re the sort of adorable that is awarded undue innocence without question, and sometimes Eve likes to execute a con in tandem just because it’s a more challenging crime. It takes her five years to realise she isn’t alone in the world with this and another ten to discover Leona may be the only one she wants to share it with.

**vi.**

The older she gets, the stranger she feels about Blondie. Logically, Eve knows she’s a dangerous dog. She’s has no business being near it unsupervised. There’s a  _ Beware of Dog _ sign attached to the fence for a reason, after all. In practise though, she’s shared scraps of food and her afternoons with the Doberman for so long that it’s softened her fear and made it malleable.

She still doesn’t dare to stick her hand through the fence though, because if it goes wrong, there is no return. For now, she keeps Blondie her very own blue eyed, ivory secret.

**vii.**

There’s a boy in her class who likes her, or so Eve assumes. He’s abrasive and shy in turns, begging for her attention only to be clueless what to do with it when he finally gets it, his entire existence caving like a card house under the weight of a mere sideways glance from her direction. One day, on a snowy Tuesday afternoon in Year Six maths, he tugs at a loose strand in her ponytail one too many times and Eve hits out at his arm so hard she leaves bloody claw marks down the side of his wrist.

It’s embarrassing for them both - the way he yelps enough for the teacher to send her outside as everyone else whispers curiously. Tobias spends the first week trying to pull his jumper sleeves over the scabs on his hands to hide them, but one of them leaves a scar that will stay with him forever.

It’s the first time Eve has left a mark on someone and it’s not nearly as life-altering as a bullet to the skull, but years later, lying in bed with another woman, he will be asked about it and there is more pain in those innocuous memories than she will ever see in the faces of the merciless men she comes to work with.

**viii.**

Eve is twelve when she decides she wants to be a police officer. Her mum chokes on the chicken when she declares her intentions over dinner, although Eve isn’t sure if it’s the surprise of the announcement or her dad’s cooking.

Her mum levels her dad with a look Eve doesn’t quite understand, and he shrugs.

“You were always encouraging of working with the public,” he murmurs and the ensuing glare from her mother is scathing even to a less perceptive audience. Her mum is a nurse and Eve suspects she’d hoped Eve would take to the NHS too (as a doctor, perhaps), but Eve wants nothing to do with the neon lit, septic corridors of a hospital.

Finally having swallowed the mouthful holding her back from complicating matters, Leona asks, “Are you going to have a gun?” and this time it’s their dad who starts coughing.

**ix.**

She’s thirteen when she first bleeds for the world. Her mother congratulates her and Eve slams a bedroom door in her face.

She’s grown four inches that year and her legs ache from the strain of it, stretch marks she isn’t allowed to scratch at marring the insides of her thighs. Boys look at her differently now that she’s outgrown them, bra straps digging into her skin and distorting the previously flat planes of her school uniform. When she imagined growing up, she only thought of the things the world would offer her and not about what she would have to give in return.

She lies on her bed holding back tears, the sheets bloodstained with this newest sacrifice and she thinks one day she’ll get her payback. It happens in Prague, fifteen years later when she breaks the arm of a man trying to accost her, his hand on her bum and his words slick in her ear. No one asks about his battered face when she brings him in even though her knuckles are coated in his blood. Eight months later, he’s convicted of sixteen counts of human trafficking and she smiles seeing the headlines in the paper.

**x.**

London is magnificent.

It makes her feel alive, something primeval in her switching on by degrees as the train she’s on clunks through ever more compact neighbourhoods - the spider web of suburbia surrounding an urban heart condensing until the gardens disappear and the houses begin to rise: five, ten, fifteen stories, endless nebulous buildings swallowed in low hanging fog. The city is large in a way nothing else has been for a few years now, because as she’s grown, the world has shrunk away from under her, but London, that is still enough to make her heart stutter.

**xi.**

Leona is no longer irritating because she is childish, but because she is a child. The disparity between them is of an entirely different nature now that Eve has begun morphing into a woman, her body expanding in ways it has not before and her mind tumultuous even at the best of times. She can reach the third shelf in the kitchen cupboards and is permanently put on dishwasher duty now she’s tall enough to put the glasses away while Leona is still rewarded for finishing the vegetables on her plate.

They fight less, but their relationship only deteriorates more because of it. Eve is simultaneously jealous of and repulsed by Leona’s easy affection with their parents: the way mum hugs her every time she comes home from football practise and the firm hand of their father ruffling her hair when he comes into the kitchen for coffee in the mornings. She doesn’t want any part in it, but she doesn’t want Leona to either when it means Eve is left sulking in all the space her parents are suddenly giving her.

**xii.**

The first time she kisses someone, Eve is fifteen, sitting on a park bench trying to keep a date going through a third ice lolly and extremely stilted conversation. Finally the silences become too much and she decides to make the first move, leaning in to kiss Tarquin with a hand on his shoulder. His mouth is large and soft, perfectly still at first, too stunned to move before it catches up to what is happening and becomes far too eager. She wipes his saliva off on the back of her hand when they separate and clears her throat, forces herself to smile at him.

Tarquin walks her down to the foot of her street afterwards and Eve thanks him for the afternoon, but doesn’t go out with him a second time when he asks her after English class the next day. Whatever she was meant to feel - that spark that’s been promised - wasn’t there, so she leaves him alone in the dark and stumbles on.

The next time she kisses someone, it’s her who is taken by surprise. It’s the week after her sixteenth birthday, just her and three of her friends loitering in an abandoned playground after the tots have cleared out. Eventually they’re reduced to just two, her and her best friend, early curfews looming threateningly in the pinking sky for their friends.

They sit in the tyre swing like they used to years ago, the rubber tilting more under their weights now, legs slotted together, thighs pressed together with knees bumping into arms. It’s comfortable and they talk about nothing like it’s everything until Hae bridges the distance between their smiling faces, her fingers sliding hesitantly up one of Eve’s denim covered thighs, the sunset falling somewhere in the distance.

“I, uh-” Eve says and promptly shuts up. She doesn’t know exactly what she wants to say, the deer-in-headlights look on Hae’s face unbearable in the moment, so she swallows and lets her gaze drift sideways.

Hae says, “I should go,” and they never speak of it again.

**xiii.**

Blondie disappears from her garden.

Monday afternoon, she’s there licking her jowls at Eve on her way home from school, and on Tuesday, she’s gone. Eve doesn’t think much of it until it’s Friday and she still hasn’t caught a glimpse of white, not on her way to school and not when she looks up from her homework to peer out the window at the house down the street.

The last time Blondie ‘disappeared’, Blondie’s family was on vacation. The car in the garage and the lights out for a whole week, Eve hadn’t needed to worry, but this time the Volvo duly leaves for ten hours a day, so she frets.

That Saturday, she sits in the downstairs window, twisted awkwardly over the back of the couch to keep watch because on weekends, the man who owns Blondie is home from the city. She pretends to read a book for English class, but makes little progress with it because she keeps glancing anxiously out of the window halfway through every paragraph.

By Sunday, her curiosity is eating her alive, but she can’t exactly ring the doorbell of a London broker to ask where his dog is, so she lives with the feeling lodged under her ribs, tucked close like a secret until she sees a head of long, ginger hair in the upstairs window and finds one of the daughters has come home from uni.

She’s a few years older than Eve, but not in the way where their lives intersected tangentially through the peripheral overlap of friends’ siblings and early forays into alcohol at the edge of the woods. Nevertheless, Eve works up the courage to talk to her, sitting in her room with her coat and shoes on for two hours until the front door goes and the girl comes out. She runs downstairs, past her mother, and nearly trips on the doorstep trying to get outside.

On the front step, Eve forces her shaking hands to still and takes a deep breath. She is careful to walk casually down the street, drifting closer in a line that is not too purposeful but nevertheless sets her on a collision course that’s impossible to ignore.

“Oh, hi,” Eve says, as if she’s only just noticed the girl, “You live just down the street, don’t you?”

The girl casts a long look back at her house before she turns to Eve and says, “Yeah, at least I used to.”

“I’ve noticed your dog over the years,” Eve says over her pounding heart and the other girl’s eyes light up.

“Blondie,” she says, her voice full of fond memories.

“Yeah. Is she alright? I haven’t seen her in a bit.”

At that, the girl’s face falls and cracks like a mirror, and Eve feels the something that’s made a home in her chest slip down into her stomach.

“She passed away last Monday,” the girl says.

“Oh,” Eve breathes. “I’m so sorry,” she manages to add as the unnamed weight inside her solidifies into grief. “She was very beautiful.”

**xiv.**

The trainwreck sadness doesn’t reach her until the following week when she’s walking home from school on the first sunny day of spring and it rips into her without warning. Eve stands in the street outside Blondie’s yard, behind the chainlink fence that they’ve spent a decade watching each other through from their respective sides, forever held apart and stitched together by those rusting scraps of metal. The _ Beware of Dog _ sign is still up - yellowed and grimy by now, red ink faded - and Eve’s vision blurs hot with tears.

There used to be two of them on this street; now there is only her.

**xv.**

Like Eve, Leona eventually ages into a thorny adolescent, her many unpredictable emotions caught up in one large tangle that has them all tripping over her various moods. She’s more tempered than her sister, but she still becomes secretive and secluded as she tries to make a home in her changing self and make sense of the disorder that reigns within.

Eve watches on with sympathy and, as they individually distance themselves from their parents, they drift closer to each other.

When the hesitant knock sounds on her door, Eve welcomes it with a firm: “Come in.”

Leona looks shyer than Eve ever remembers her being and it’s enough to make her put down the magazine she’s reading and give her sister her full attention.

“Yeah?” Eve prompts and Leona says: “If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to say anything to Dad?”

“Depends,” Eve says, old enough now to know that loyalty is not necessarily a virtue. “If you’re doing drugs-”

“No, no!” Leona interjects hastily, surprising even herself with how panicked she sounds. “It’s not like that. I would never. It’s, um-” she takes a deep breath- “boy trouble.” Suddenly embarrassed, she rushes to add, “I’d ask Nina and Tika, but...” Leona trails off and swallows, uncertain in the uncharted waters of her own mortification.

“I see,” Eve says. “Tell me.”

“So there’s this boy,” she starts and the way she says ‘boy’ sounds like she’s talking about a foreign species of reptile, “He’s in the year above. I met him at Tika’s; he’s on her brother’s basketball team.”

_ Ade _ , Eve fills in in her mind. In the year below her, charismatic and extremely handsome, Eve can imagine exactly what sort of company he keeps.

Leona heaves, “...but Nina said she liked him first, so it doesn’t even matter,” concluding the rant that Eve seems to have missed a good part of, not that she doesn’t get the gist of it.

Finding the root of the problem, Eve says, “You’re afraid Nina’s gonna be mad at you?”

Leona chews her lip, but nods – a sign that  _ that _ isn’t the only thing bothering her.

“And Tika? Do you worry she’ll take Nina’s side too?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Eve says, getting out of her chair to sit her sister on her bed and climb on after her so that they’re face to face when she says: “The fact that you’re worried about them and not him really says it all.”

Her sister’s face falls for a moment before she finds her bearings and readjusts.

“You’re saying he’s not worth the trouble.” It isn’t a question and it isn’t a plea to tell her otherwise; there isn’t even resignation in Leona’s voice, and Eve is seized by a surge of affection for her sister.

“Mm-mmh,” she says and the smile she gets is tiny and timid, but it marks the beginning of a new era. Leona is still years behind her, but she isn’t a child anymore, clawing her way through her teens now instead, and all Eve can think of is how much she’s missed having an ally.

**xvi.**

The months after school are long and uncertain. Her summer is filled with insecurity - the wait for exam results and what to do after - and relief at finally being free of this, forever. She’s going to apply to the police academy as soon as she gets her grades, but that is still months away, and her parents continue to idly hope she’ll end up going to university instead, even if it means taking a gap year. It’s what they’ve fought about for years now - intermittently at first and then more and more often.

Eventually, her parents resigned themselves to the fact that she could not be assuaged and the argument had withered away to exist only briefly in weighted silences and off-hand comments over the breakfast table that Eve refuses to engage in anymore. It’s left them at an impasse, Eve’s vision for her life having bifurcated from her parents’.

She takes on a shape they hadn’t envisioned, always trying to reconcile who she is to herself with the way they see her.

She’s grown out of shoes and shirts, has gone through dozens of metamorphoses in her few years on earth, and now she has become someone new again. She has B-cup curves and hip bones that jut out from under her skin; her thighs have amassed a softness they did not have before. She’s beginning to look a lot like her mother in the old photographs on her parents’ dresser, but they are further removed from one another than ever before. Eve used to be inside her and now she is not, the circles on the venn diagram of their lives gradually drifting apart. Soon she will move out and live somewhere else, unshaded and unshared, and the thought is thrilling.

When it finally happens, the leaves are yellowing in the tree in the back garden where Eve finds Leona dangling from the tire swing whose rope has turned green over the years. She looks overgrown squeezed in the diameter of the tire, the branch bending more than it used to.

Eve and Leona aren’t the only ones who have aged here. The tree has grown, their house is greying from wet autumns and winters, the back porch floorboards slippery with decay. Down the street, there’s one less dog and a slightly rustier fence that Eve now walks past without a second glance.

She’s found her feet here - learned to walk, run, cycle, fight - and every ounce she’s gained has come from all that’s around her. Eighteen years of her parents’ lives have gone into raising her, her mother’s crow’s feet and her dad’s greying hair the consequence of her standing tall. It makes her feel homesick before she’s even left and Eve stands there blinking away tears while Leona rocks idly back and forth on the balls of her feet.

“I’m going now,” Eve shouts once she’s managed to swallow the lump in her throat and dares to come closer.

Close up, Eve can see the gooseflesh on her arms from where her t-shirt sleeves have left Leona exposed. She shivers involuntarily and Eve folds her own arms tighter against her chest as if it will somehow preserve more heat for her sister. 

“It’s gonna be weird when you’re not around,” Leona says, half squinting into a bright sky.

“You’ll be alright,” Eve tells her without looking directly at her, her gaze drifting instead to the gap at the side of the house where she can see across the street. Blondie’s yard is out of sight, but it’s still there the same way Eve will always be in this house: heels loud on the stairs, sitting owl-eyed in the empty chair at the kitchen table, her and her sister’s battle tally scratched into the bark beside the swing they made their ultimate prize.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://obfuscatress.tumblr.com/) or [twitter.](https://twitter.com/Shippress)


End file.
